The researchers, Emil Kirkegaard and Julius Daugbjerg Bjerrekær, used data scraping software developed by a third contributor, Oliver Nordbjerg, to collect the information for a study that explored, among other things, the thinking of people on the site. They posted the database along with a draft paper on Open Science Framework, a site that encourages open source science research and collaboration.

Unlike recent incidents at Ashley Madison, a site for people seeking extramarital affairs, as well as some adult networks that cater to people with fetishes, the OkCupid research did not involve a security breach. That didn’t stop the ensuing controversy.

“Some may object to the ethics of gathering and releasing this data,” the authors wrote in the draft paper, which has since been pulled. “However, all the data found in the dataset are or were already publicly available, so releasing this dataset merely presents it in a more useful form.”

Online commenters, OkCupid users, the site’s operators, and academics attacked (and, in some cases, threatened) the researchers for making user information public. Some questioned whether such data harvesting, bundling, and broadcasting is justifiable for academic research and whether it crosses ethical and legal lines.

Although the researchers did not release the real names and pictures of the OkCupid users, critics noted that their identities could easily be uncovered from the details provided—such as from the usernames. “Your private life is a few big leaks away from being an inescapable matter of public record, once a statistician with BitTorrent gets bored,” said Scott Weingart, a digital humanities specialist at Carnegie Mellon University, mused in a post on Twittertwtr. He added that it would be easy to identify more than 10,000 of the people in the data dump and link them to their sexual inclinations.

Kirkegaard said that his group posted people’s usernames because it found the data on these self-selected pseudonyms to be scientifically interesting. (What does use of the word “hot” in an alias say about its subject, for example?) He also argued that retaining the information in the dataset would allow certain missing details—like height, profile text, or photos—to be added later.

The data, collected from November 2014 to March 2015, is indeed public—sort of. Some of it like bios, photos, age, gender, sexual orientation is easily accessible through basic Google goog searches. Answers to some 2,600 of the service’s most popular dating survey questions are restricted to people who are logged into the site and who have answered the same questions.

The site’s users can also set certain answers to “private,” which makes the responses inaccessible to others. In this case, the researchers scraped and presented the data accessible through Google and Q&A responses from individual profiles.

“We thought this was an obvious case of public data scraping so that it would not be a legal problem,” Kirkegaard wrote to Fortune.

Last week after the appearance of the dataset began inciting an uproar, Open Science Framework, the site that hosted the data, placed it behind a password-protected wall. OkCupid then filed a copyright claim on Friday ordering the site to take it down altogether. The page where the data initially appeared was initially changed to read: “Unavailable for legal reasons.” Now it simply states “Content removed.”

The editorial board at Open Differential Psychology, the journal to which the researchers submitted the accompanying paper (and where Kirkegaard is the editor), is currently reviewing the submission, Kirkegaard told the science blog Retraction Watch. “If the journal does not take the paper, we will probably publish it elsewhere,” he said.

OkCupid, owned by InterActivCorp’s iacMatch Groupmtch, released a statement that complained about the published data. “This was a violation of our terms of service and we sent a take-down notice,” Mathew Traub, a spokesperson for OkCupid, told Fortune in an email. “They appear to have complied.”

Kirkegaard said in a Twitter post that he did not ask the company for permission to collect or publish the data beforehand. Some commenters have argued that the researchers breached research ethics by failing to obtain the consent of the OkCupid users, too, before gathering and republishing their information. They cite, among other things, “code of conduct” guidelines by the American Psychological Association.

Aarhus University in Denmark, the school at which Kirkegaard is a graduate student, distanced itself from the team of students, who undertook the project in their spare time. “The views and actions by student Emil Kirkegaard is not on behalf of AU,” the university said in a statement posted to Twitter. “[H]is actions are entirely his own responsibility.”

This is not the first time someone has scraped the profile data of OkCupid users, of course. At least one individual cleverly “hacked” the dating system to get more romantic matches several years ago. And the site’s co-founder, Christian Rudder, published a treatise on data science that analyzed information from the data-rich dating network. These cases are different, however, from the latest instance of scraping, packaging and releasing profile information publicly.

In a message sent to Fortune, Kirkegaard wrote that he did not rule out the possibility of republishing the data his team collected with more effort put into obscuring the identity of the OKCupid users. Given OKCupid’s interpretation of its terms of service agreement—and its copyright claim—it’s unlikely that the company will sign off on the proposed compromise. As with the Harvard Facebook study, the data may very well remain in limbo.

It’s no surprise that people are sensitive to having their romantic and other interests neatly presented for others to rifle through online, even if done in the name of science. In addition to questions raised about the ethics of certain data science practices, the boundaries of open science research, and the ease of identifying the members of a given dataset, the incident reveals something else, too: People continue to give up vast quantities of their personal data to sites online, expecting privacy.

Match Group Shares Find Investor Love After IPO

(Reuters) – Shares of media mogul Barry Diller’s Match Group, the owner of popular dating site Match.com and mobile app Tinder, jumped 23% in their market debut on Thursday, valuing the company at $3.54 billion.

Match Group, which touts itself as the world’s No. 1 dating company, is seen as the crown jewel of Diller’s media properties and has driven parent IAC/InterActiveCorp’s profit and revenue in recent quarters.

The U.S. online romance market, worth more than $2 billion a year, has thrived as instant messaging, photo-sharing and geolocation services grow in popularity.

One of Match Group’s most popular offerings is Tinder, a mobile app on which people “swipe right” or “swipe left” to signal their willingness – or not – to meet prospective partners.

The company’s solid opening, along with the stellar debut of mobile payments company Square Inc on Thursday, offered hope to startups hoping to go public. Square’s shares rose as much as 64% in their debut.

“It’s very good that Square went public and moved up because now people will be more open to tech stocks next year,” said Francis Gaskins, president of research firm IPO Desktop.

Gaskins said shares of both Square and Match Group had risen as their offerings had been priced low. Shares of Match were priced at $12 each, at the lower end of the expected range of $12 to $14.

Both companies have come to the market at a time when several others were forced to discount or delay IPOs. More than 50 companies have withdrawn plans to go public in the United States this year, according to Thomson Reuters data.

PROUD PARENT

Match Group, which also owns OkCupid and OurTime, plans to use the $400 million proceeds to repay debt owed to IAC IACI, which retains a stake of about 86% in Match Group.

Shares of IAC fell as much as 2.6% before easing back to trade down 0.5%.

Benchmark Co analyst Daniel Kurnos called the stock move “ridiculous”, saying IAC’s majority shareholding in Match should have guaranteed a boost, and that some investors were clearly selling IAC for Match.

With more than 59 million monthly active users and about 4.7 million paid members as of Sept. 30, Match Group operates in 190 countries and 38 languages.

That said, IPOs in the Web romance business have been rare.

Infidelity website Ashley Madison had hoped to raise up to $200 million this year, but seems to have shelved those plans after hackers released salacious details of more than a million users in August.

JPMorgan Chase & Co, Allen & Co and Bank of America Merrill Lynch were among underwriters for the offering.

This is the IPO You Missed Today

All right, stock junkies. While investors kept their eyes glued on mobile payments startup Square and dating giant Match Group on Thursday following their initial public offerings, a less well-known firm also held an IPO.

The name’s MimecastMIME, a cloud-based email management and security company that is headquartered in London. The firm’s stock debuted on NASDAQ on Thursday, pricing its 7.8 million shares at $10 each—the low end of an expected range that extended to $12.

After reaching $11.90 within the first hour of trading Thursday, the share price fell near to the original $10 price (as of the writing of this post).

Fortune asked Peter Bauer, the company’s co-founder and CEO, how he felt taking his firm public on the same day as the hotly anticipated companies Square SQ and Match Group MTCH. The latter, the parent of online dating company of Tinder and OkCupid spun, out from media mogul Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp IAC.

“We’re thrilled to be on the same stage as them,” he said. “I get quite a kick out of taking the company public on the same day that Jack Dorsey’s taking his company public,” referring to the CEO who leads both Square and Twitter TWTR. “It’s wonderful to be able to share a bit of the spotlight with the other high profile IPOs.”

Mimecast, founded in 2003, sells its software services to roughly 15,200 organizations across the globe, mostly in Europe, North America, and South Africa. NetSuite N, ZenDesk ZEN, and Tableau DATA are among its customers.

Revenues for the fiscal year ended in March grew by nearly a third to $116.1 million. During that time, Mimecast earned a slight profit of about $300,000, although it posted a net loss of $100,000 in the six months following.

The company’s name derives from MIME, or “Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions,” the Internet protocol that lets email correspondents exchange various types of data, including photos, video, and audio. In fact, the company’s chief scientist, Nathaniel Borenstein, is a pioneer of the technology, having helped co-create the protocol in the ’90s. He holds the distinction of being one of the first people ever to send an email attachment in 1992. (The file in question was an audio recording of his barbershop quarter, the Telephone Chords, singing about bits and bandwidth. And yes, it’s way more delightful than that hallmark “You’ve got mail” notification AOL used back then.)

“What the development of that standard meant for the world was that instead of emails just being like blank postcards, they became like envelopes and could have attachments and carry files inside them,” Bauer told Fortune. “The MIME standard made that interoperability possible and work all around the Internet.”

He added: “One thing we’re celebrating today is standing on the shoulders of the giants who created email. Now we’re making safer and better Internet applications today.”

Prior to raising roughly $77.5 million in the IPO, Mimecast had raised $95 million in three rounds of funding from investment firms Insight Venture Partners, Index Ventures, and Dawn Capital. The company has more than 600 employees in nine offices, the newest of which is in Australia.

Mimecast’s IPO followed two other big cybersecurity IPOs this year: Rapid7 RPD, an IT security firm based in Boston, Mass., in July; and SophosSOPH, a UK-based software and hardware security firm, in June. Other cybersecurity firms that appear poised for a debut on the public markets in the coming year include Veracode, Bit9 + Carbon Black, LogRhythm, and Okta.

“Email has been an Achilles heel in so many cyberattacks lately,” Bauer said. “It’s an underinvested area.”

Follow Robert Hackett on Twitter at @rhhackett. Read his cybersecurity, technology, and business coverage here. And subscribe to Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the business of technology, where he writes a weekly column.

Tinder’s Parent Company Sets IPO Price

Online dating empire Match Group set the price of its initial public offering at $12 per share, the company said late on Wednesday.

Pricing on the low end of its targeted range of $12 to $14, the company raised $400 million as it readies to start trading Thursday morning on NASDAQ under ticker symbol “MTCH.” The pricing gives the company a market value of $2.9 billion.

Match Group owns more than 40 online dating properties including Tinder, Match.com, and OkCupid. Most of the company will continue to be owned by current parent IAC/InterActiveCorp IACI.

Match Group has focused on the shift to mobile devices in recent years with its portfolio of dating site, especially with Tinder and OkCupid. When it filed to go public in October, the company said that 68% of new users in the first half of this year signed up through mobile compared to only 27% during the first half of 2013.

Earlier this month, the company said it had $85 million in profits during the first nine months of the year compared with $100 million during a same period a year earlier. Revenue was $753 million versus $649 million during the same time frame.

The CEO of Tinder Just Used an Unfortunate Word

Match Group is expected to price its initial public offering late Wednesday. The company, recently spun off by Barry Diller’s InterActive Corp., is parent to a number of different online dating properties, including OkCupid and the even buzzier Tinder.

In an IPO market that’s been showing cracks recently, there is no guarantee that Match (MTCH) stock will be a hit. So the timing of a very unflattering profile of Tinder CEO Sean Rad is not auspicious.

The 29-year-old founder, who developed the app at OkCupid’s R&D lab in 2012, spoke to the Evening Standard, a London newspaper, which posted the interview on Wednesday morning. In the interview, Rad makes a number of comments that are fairly cringeworthy. According to the profile, Rad, an avid user of his own product, made the following comments on the record:

He suggested that a model who is “really, really famous” has been “begging” him for sex. “I don’t care if someone is a model,” he told the paper. “It sounds clichéd and almost totally unbelievable for a guy to say this, but it’s true. I need an intellectual challenge.”

Rad then confused intellectual attraction with anal sex. “Apparently there’s a term for someone who gets turned on by intellectual stuff. You know, just talking. What’s the word … I want to say ‘sodomy?’”

He appeared to imply that he dug up dirt on the Vanity Fair journalist who wrote a story on Tinder earlier this year that the company did not like; Rad is still upset over the story. The reporter describes him “muttering mysteriously” (her words) about “background research” (his) that he conducted on Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales. “There’s some stuff about her as an individual that will make you think differently,” Rad said.

Even Tinder’s communications VP, Rosette Pambakian, was uncomfortable with Rad’s comments at the time, if the story is to be believed. At one point, in front of the reporter, she said, “We’re going to be fired.” It’s not clear if she was speaking in jest or not.

Tinder’s user base has grown exponentially, and its in-app experience has been hugely influential: Scores of other apps, not all of them for dating, now use a swipe functionality. But the company has not been without major controversy: Last year, a senior employee, Whitney Wolfe, accused co-founder Justin Mateen of sexual harassment, and Valleywag acquired text messages from Mateen to Wolfe.

In light of the scandal, Mateen resigned in September 2014, and Tinder settled with Wolfe, who went on to create her own competing dating app, Bumble. A few months after Mateen left, in November 2014, Rad was out as the company’s CEO, but took the job back this past August.

In a phone call with Fortune about the Evening Standard story, a Tinder spokesperson declined to give any comment on the record.

Match Group has essentially been the Anheuser-Busch InBev of the online dating industry, buying up smaller dating services like HowAboutWe and PlentyOfFish. Sam Yagan, who co-founded OkCupid, sold it to IAC, and became CEO of Match, has told Fortunethat for any small online dating company that gets traction, “You’re going to launch, you’re going to get some success, [and] I’m going to buy you for cheap because you don’t have another bidder.”

Match has reportedly eyed an initial price of $12 to $14 per share. The Evening Standard profile of Rad could impact trading, at least on the stock’s first day. But if it doesn’t, it will serve as a reminder that any press may be good press—perhaps especially so for a controversial dating app.

Tinder parent company Match just filed to go public

Match, which owns some of the biggest dating websites and apps around, filed to go public, according to SEC documents. The properties it owns includes the highly popular app Tinder, OKCupid, PlentyOfFish, Match, and HowAboutWe.

Establishing a romantic connection is a fundamental human need. Whether it’s a good date, a meaningful relationship or an enduring marriage, romantic connectivity lifts the human spirit. Our mission is to increase romantic connectivity worldwide.

The company stated that it reached about 511 million users worldwide with its slate of products. It added, “Coinciding with the general trend toward mobile technology, we have experienced a meaningful shift in our user base from desktop devices to mobile devices, and now offer mobile experiences on substantially all of our dating products. During the first half of 2015, 68% of our new users signed up for our products through mobile channels, as compared to only 27% during the first half of 2013.”

“This shift has enabled us to reach groups of users which had previously proven elusive, such as the millennial audience; for example, Tinder, a mobile-only product, has been able to tap into this audience rapidly over the last few years,” according to Match in the filing. “Additionally, in previously desktop-oriented products like Match, the shift to mobile has led to increased usage of our products, as mobile users on average access our products at meaningfully higher.”

The company added that since January 2009, it has invested “approximately $1,284.0 million to acquire 25 new brands for [its] dating portfolio, including OkCupid, Meetic, Twoo and PlentyOfFish.”

Note: This story was revised from the original to more clearly describe Match.com’s profit.

Transgender is yesterday’s news: How companies are grappling with the ‘no gender’ society

With Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn, transgender issues have become front and center in the mainstream cultural conversation. But among many young people, there is a much bigger conversation going on about gender. The whole notion of “binary” — female and male — gender norms is being seen as limiting, and unnecessary.

At elite liberal arts colleges like Vassar and Wesleyan, students have earnest conversations about gender being a “social construct,” and bathrooms are “gender neutral,” not co-ed. Some young people are defining their identity as “gender fluid” – as have “Orange is the New Black” star Ruby Rose and pop singer Miley Cyrus. (People who are gender fluid may feel their gender identity is neither male nor female or switches back and forth between male and female.) The University of Vermont validated a third, gender neutral option and allows students to choose a new first name, regardless if the name has been legally changed, and chosen pronoun. (People who do not identify as male or female prefer the pronoun “they,” rather than “he” or “she.” )

A 2013 report from Intelligence Group, a consumer insights and strategy firm, found that 60% of people between the ages of 14 and 34 think gender lines are blurred and nearly two-thirds say it’s their generation that’s pushing those boundaries. MTV’s head of programming Colin Nash gets the dialogue, telling Variety: “Gender neutral is kind of the new thing…Trans almost feels like a couple years behind for our audience.”

From a business perspective, it’s becoming more obvious that companies that want to reach teenage and Millennial consumers (and talent) have to show they “get it.” Facebook made it official last February when it told the world that limiting binary-gendered options is a thing of the past and added a third option to its standard male and female ones: custom. From a drop-down menu, users can select from 58 different identities, including agender, androgyne, gender fluid, trans female, trans male, trans person, cisgender, and two-spirit. (Each term refers to a subtle variation of gender and sexual identity and expression.) For users who don’t fit into the 58 pre-populated list of gender identities, Facebook offers a 59th option: “fill in the blank.”

Four months after expanding its gender list in the U.S., the social media giant unrolled 70 custom gender options for its U.K. users, including intersex man, intersex woman, and asexual as well as allow users to choose either a female, male, or gender neutral pronouns.

Cassidy Madison was one of the many who immediately changed gender and personal pronoun when Facebook made its changes. “I was so excited about that,” said Madison, a 20-year-old college student at Goucher College in Maryland who identifies as genderqueer, nonbinary, and uses the pronoun ‘they.” Genderqueer is commonly defined as neither man nor woman, possibly in between the two or a totally separate gender altogether. “It makes me feel finally like my identity is being validated by someone other than myself. We live in a culture that says that you’re a boy or a girl or a man or a woman and there’s nothing else in-between.”

“People treat non binary people like they’re just burdens and to see a company saying basically we care about you and your well-being, that your identity is valid and we support you, that’s incredible,” continued Madison. “Even from just a marketing sense, it sets your business apart from other businesses.”

Currently, only 1 percent of OkCupid’s 10 million members worldwide are using the company’s expanded gender and orientation options. This number does not include users who identify as gay, lesbian, and bisexual, but only those using the expanded genders and orientations options. Out of those who do, nearly 9 percent identified as non-binary and 8.5 percent identified as genderqueer, said Jimena Almendares, Chief Product Officer at OkCupid.

Miley Cyrus, at a 2015 amfAR Inspiration Gala New York, says she now identifies as “gender fluid.”

Much of the inspiration for the company’s growing lists come from the 20 percent of the employees who identify as non-straight or non-binary, says Almendares, because they get it. Making a successful romantic match is tough, but when you add people with non-binary genders, that adds another layer of complexity. So, OkCupid expanded gender and sexual orientations options give its matchmakers a better chance to successfully match users with partners.

For users who identify as non-binary, OkCupid offers an option to hide these profiles from straight users on the site. In March 2014, the site aligned itself with the LGBTQ community when it briefly blocked users from accessing the site through the Mozilla Firefox Web browser after allegations surfaced that Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich’s donated to a campaign supporting California’s Proposition 8, which temporarily put gay and lesbian marriages in the state on hold.

Additionally, OkCupid launched OkCupid.com/identity in time for the start of NYC Pride festivities on June 23. The new site includes definitions of all gender and identity tags used by OkCupid and definitions from the dictionary and users. “To create the site, we reached out to [OkCupid users] to ask them what the terms meant to them and how would they best describe them,” said Almendares. “We hope this initiative will not only be educational, but also eye-opening.”

With more young people refusing to be put in the binary-gendered box, more companies may follow suit, especially if they want to reach young consumers. The expanded ideas about gender identities are not a passing fad, says Jen Jack Gieseking, who identifies as transgender, lesbian, queer and goes by the pronoun “s/he.”

“The shifts we see happening around gender and gender identities are the opposite of a fad,” said Gieseking, who recently accepted a position at Trinity College as assistant professor of Public Humanities. “If we look back through history, we can see gender non-conforming people. What is happening today is a profound change in society, both for individual and group understanding, and a recognition of a persistent element of the human condition.”

Does bitcoin have potential for online dating sites?

Two years ago, dating site OkCupid began accepting the digital currency bitcoin as payment.

OkCupid is free to use, but it offers an upgraded “A-list” account for $10 a month that includes premium features like the ability to browse profiles anonymously. Users can now spring for one of these upgrades using BTC, as it’s known, instead of USD, through a Coinbase account.

You could say that accepting bitcoin was just a marketing gimmick—that OkCupid, which is part of Match Inc., owned by Barry Diller’s IAC, was just looking to garner some goodwill and buzz among tech types. And it did get them that, even if the number of A-list subscribers that pay with bitcoin is likely small. The Financial Times, at the time, called OkCupid “the biggest brand name” to begin accepting the digital currency. OkCupid founder and CEO Sam Yagan, who is also CEO of Match Inc., reasoned at the time: “There’s no question that these digital currencies are going to be the future.”

Badoo, a London-based dating site founded in 2006 by Russian entrepreneur Andrey Andreev, also takes bitcoin. The site started accepting bitcoin in January, in just Spain, Italy and the UK, through Dutch payment platform Smart2Pay. This month, it expanded that option to 20 more countries. A Badoo spokesperson said that it was “reflective of Badoo’s position as an early adopter.”

But few other major dating sites take bitcoin, even though so many of them now offer goodies that users can pay for with a tap in a mobile app. Some of those sites use a “premium” business model that allows access only with payment. Others have a “freemium” model, where the core service is free but upgrades come with a cost. All of them could easily make the same move as OkCupid and Badoo. Why haven’t they?

Zoosk, which recently appointed a new CEO, moved to a premium model in November. Its users now must spend money to message other users, which wasn’t the case a year ago. But the service still lets people purchase certain features without becoming full members, using digital currency it calls Zoosk Coins. Those features include raising your popularity on the site (with a feature called “Boost”), unlocking new matches (in its “Carousel”), and buying virtual gifts for other members.

Neumate, a lesser known dating site, also uses its own digital token, which members can send to non-members to give them 24 hours of access to Neumate’s premium features. Indeed, even mighty Facebook FB once offered credits that its users could put toward electronic gifts, like stickers, for friends.

Zoosk has members in 80 countries and currently accepts 55 different currencies for payment. At the moment, bitcoin, which has made major progress toward legitimacy in recent years, is not one of those 55.

In Zoosk’s case, it may be because Kelly Steckelberg, Zoosk’s new chief executive, remains hesitant. “I don’t know that bitcoin is at a place yet that it makes sense for us,” she says, “but certainly if it ever got there, we would consider it, absolutely. I think that if it eventually becomes a mainstream payment option, we would certainly look at adding it to the currency that we support.”

At its current pricing, 180 Zoosk Coins will run you $20—that’s about 11 cents per Zoosk Coin. Or, at bitcoin’s value at the time of writing, .0004407 bitcoin.

A dating app for lesbians, by a lesbian

Robyn Exton wanted to help a gay girlfriend who had gone through a break-up get back on the market. But Exton found that dating apps for lesbians were few and akin to Grindr, a service for gay men that is infamous for flings.

So Exton, a former marketer, created Her, a free app for women looking to date other women. The idea is to create a community for lesbians looking to make friends, chat, and, of course, date.

There are plenty of general-purpose dating apps that gay woman can use. Match.com, OkCupid, Coffee Meets Bagel and Tinder are just some of them. But these were all originally created for straight audiences and tend to be riddled with men masquerading as women or couples looking for threesomes. Moreover, lesbians who use Tinder have occasionally complained about finding straight women or men in their searches.

Dating apps specifically for gay women are limited. The most prominent is Brenda, an app similar to Grindr that was created by a man.

During a recent happy hour for lesbians at a bar in Oakland, Calif., the phrase “online dating” elicited groans across the entire room. Most of the women mentioned using Tinder, but said they disliked how they had to base decisions about potential dates on a single photo and then swipe the screen to either like or reject them.

In general, the crowd favored OkCupid, which features wordy profiles that give users a better sense of individual personalities. But the service is aimed at heterosexual users. Only about half of the women in the room had heard of Exton’s app. No one had tried it, but everyone was excited by the prospect of a different type of dating app.

Angelique Naylor, an IT professional belonged in the part of the room that hadn’t heard about Exton’s dating app, but she’s irked by the current offerings on the market. “Coffee Meets Bagel only allows you one match a day,” she said, mentioning one of the dating services. “And with Tinder, you swipe and swipe and then, it’s like ‘Oh crap, she was cute. I just rejected her and she’s gone forever.’”

Nothing existed for lesbians designed by lesbians until Her came along in September of 2013. Exton says. Exton herself is gay, and says her San Francisco-based team is made up of four queer women and two straight guys.

Exton originally named the service Dattch, a blend of the words “date” and “catch.” But she decided to upgrade the app after sending out user feedback surveys last November. She got rid of the name—people find it hard to pronounce Dattch—and decided to make the app more community focused. “Everyone wanted to see the social aspect. What are the big events? What is everyone up to?”

Users of Her see one profile at a time. If both users “like” each other, they are matched and will be able to send messages to one another. The profiles are reminiscent of Pinterest, the virtual bulletin board where users can “pin” favorite pictures. On Her users can add multiple photographs with captions, or short descriptions and favorite quotes to their profile.

Exton said encouraging multiple photos opens a window into a user’s personality. It also eliminates the need for women to describe themselves. “They are terrible at it,” she explained. “They tend to undersell themselves.”

Originally, Exton’s product was aimed purely at dating. However, after a user survey late last year, she decided to refocus the product around creating a community of lesbians.

“Everyone wanted to the see the social aspect,” she said. “What are the big events? What is everyone up to?”

The new version of the app features news feeds for eight cities filled with articles written by locals and listings of area events. More articles about dating and gay life are available in a blog.

For Exton, one of the most challenging parts of creating Her was finding investors. Some said she didn’t think she fit their stereotype. “I got lots of reactions like ‘You can’t possibly be a lesbian, you’ve got long hair,'” Exton recalled. Others simply saw no need for the app because they had never considered lesbian dating as major problem to solve.

“We don’t have proof there’s a market,” Exton was told.

To that, Exton responds by saying user traffic is growing 30% per month. But she declined to disclose how many users that translates into or any other details.

Exton’s future plans include rolling the app out in more cities. A paid version is also a possibility. “This isn’t just about dating,” said Exton. “It’s about simplifying how to talk to girls.” A sentiment, straight men could probably agree with as well.

(This story was updated with revised information about when Her will be publicly available)

OKCupid: We experiment on users too

Facebook isn’t the only Internet company to experiment on its users. On Monday, the popular dating web site OkCupid revealed that it, too, had toyed with its 30 million members.

The announcement comes weeks after Facebook FB revealed it had adjusted the news feeds of over 600,000 users — dialing up or down the number of positive and negative posts they saw — without their explicit consent. The move was part of a psychological study to examine the potential effects of social media on human emotions. The study generated a hailstorm of criticism that Facebook was manipulating its users, even possibly harming them. (“I wonder if Facebook KILLED anyone with their emotion manipulation stunt,” Lauren Weinstein, a privacy activist, Tweeted. “At their scale and with depressed people out there, it’s possible.”)

In the case of OkCupid, the dating site not only acknowledges it’s performed tests on users like Facebook did, but it argues such tests are the norm. “Guess what, everybody: If you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site,” Christian Rudder,OkCupid co-founder, wrote in a blog post. “That’s how websites work.”

In the same post, Rudder listed three of OkCupid’s “most interesting experiments.” In one, the web site celebrated the release of their blind date app last year by taking down users’ photos for seven hours. Unsurprisingly, people engaged with the site less overall, but they also interacted with one another online differently: People responded to initial messages 44% more often than normal, and they exchanged phone numbers or email addresses more quickly. Without photos to go on, users were forced to actually talk to one another.

Another experiment sought to analyze just how important a person’s looks were in users’ quests to find love. Based on data gathered by the site, users essentially equated “looks” and “personality” as being the same thing. Rudder pointed to a user’s profile photo of a scantily clad woman clinging to a block of wood — a photo that would not have seemed out of place if run in the latest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. That particularly fetching user ranked in OkCupid’s 99th percentile as far as popularity goes, despite the fact her profile contained no text whatsoever.

But perhaps the craftiest of tests – or most nefarious – involved gauging the power of suggestion, or in this case, the influence OkCupid has on users. The site took what it considered “bad matches” and recommended them as “good matches.” As it turned out, users were more likely to interact with those matches. What didn’t change however was the likelihood of users hitting it off. Even meddling with people’s online experience it seems doesn’t affect plain old compatibility.

Still, what OkCupid effectively did was lie to its users. It had promised to match them with the most compatible potential mates. And in the case of the last experiment, it did the opposite. Rudder can say what ever he likes — “that’s how websites work” — but when those experiments defy the site’s original goal and tarnish the user experience, that’s not just manipulation on a large-scale, it’s outright deception. More so even than Facebook’s study (Facebook played with the ratio of negative to positive posts users saw — it didn’t pass off said posts as anything else than what they were).

If OkCupid’s tactics reflect the web in general, the digital world should rethink business as usual.